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Comment by joezydeco | Hacker News Reader

The key is Google Docs.

In my district, Google has really gone all-out to get Docs integrated into the teacher's repertoire and support it as much as possible. Every teacher, administrator, and student has a permanent account maintained by one IT person at HQ.

The collaboration is the primary driver. gDocs is way ahead of iWork and even my youngest kids are now comfortable working in Documents and Slides (1st graders making slide presentations! The mind boggles).

Being able to log in from anywhere (school and home) is the secondary driver and, again, this is a place where Apple is too little and too late.

The iPads in our elementary school are being used less and less. It's all on Chromebooks now and, yeah, they're cheap/disposable and all the other things people are saying in this thread.

But the software is the killer.

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This is exactly right. I volunteer in an after-school dropin center in a public housing project. Our big drama crises these days come when our kiddos can't remember their Google for Education (Google Docs) passwords.

We had a little grant to buy three ipads. We repurposed it to buy six chromebooks, and things are going very well.

It's really sweet, actually, with the managed chromebooks. The kiddos know what they're getting and we don't have so much of the "hey, do your homework before you play games" hassles.

Repurposing is something I forgot to mention as well.

There are a lot of schools sitting on PCs from the last decade that aren't doing much other than running educational programs written for WindowsXP.

gDocs at least lets schools repurpose those machines and make them usable with the current curriculum. And then you have a foot in the door when it comes to the next round of equipment purchases.

Yeah, there's iWork on browser now but again, too little too late.

That is a good point. My parents still can't wrap their heads around an Office suite that's not Microsoft, and online. It's like I'm speaking Greek to them. Then I was shocked when my son started turning me on to some handy extensions and templates.

I'll admit, I was proud of our district's IT department for making a smart recommendation.

Spot on. My kid's just moved from primary to high school (in the UK), and he keeps his same @sch account name. All his work just follows him through the system, it's really smart.

I'm late to the party, but there's one more important point here.

By having that one IT person at HQ, Google is also reducing the amount of money each school district spends on tech by eliminating / reducing sys admin and support staff.

Whether or not this is a good thing overall, I don't know. But public schools like to save money everywhere they can these days.

My school, a private semi-religious, school in Georgetwon taught presentations to 3rd graders, and I'm 31. While it seems crazy, it's not so much of a stretch to pull that back two years.

It's interesting to see how kids have adapted to the slide deck as a form of writing documents.

It seems to be a lot more intuitive and creative for them (draw a text box here, drag-and-drop a picture there) than the traditional word processing model, which was taken from typewriters when you think about it. We're two generations past using those anymore.

At first glance my thoughts were "shit, we're raising a generation of kids that will communicate solely through awful Powerpoint presentations and clip art", but in reality they've just adapted the tool that works best for them.

Further degradation of writing skills seems a legitimate concern.

Having said that, slide format really does seem like natural way to communicate many types of information. In fact, I see a general trend toward delivering things like survey results in the form of a slide deck even though the format isn't such that it's really designed to be presented in its raw form. This reflects attention spans and it's just increasingly difficult to get people to read 8 page papers.

So I'm not really against slide decks per se.

But what does happen a lot is that contents (information density, etc.) don't get tailored for the use and audience. A keynote at a conference and the full results from a detailed survey may both be delivered in slide form but they should have a look and feel that are a lot different.

when I was in school I used to use my email service's 'save as draft' function as a log in anywhere document store

You're right that persistent data stores are a boon for education and I hope you're right that the administration is actively integrating it

I really like the fact that gdocs also has a version control feature built in

It's my opinion that version control is an important concept for people to understand and grow comfortable with using

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